Windows Insider – Build 18312 Rolls Out to Fast Ring Insiders

Microsoft is rolling out Build 18312 to Fast Ring Insiders. This builds includes several new features to check out, including improvements to the “Reset this PC” UI and the subsystem for Linux Command Line Tool.

What’s New in Build 18312

Reserving disk space to keep Windows 10 up to date: In 19H1, we’re making a few changes to how Windows 10 manages disk space. Through reserved storage, some disk space will be set aside to be used by updates, apps, temporary files, and system caches. Our goal is to improve the day-to-day function of your PC by ensuring critical OS functions always have access to disk space. With reserved storage, updates, apps, temporary files, and caches are less likely to take away from valuable free space and should continue to operate as expected. Reserved storage will be introduced automatically on PCs that come with 19H1 pre-installed or on PCs where 19H1 was clean installed.

FLS Slot Limit Increase: As PCs get more powerful, musicians have created increasingly complex projects with more tracks, more instruments, and deeper effects chains. As a result, some of those musicians were running up against an FLS (Fiber Local Storage) slot allocation ceiling that prevented them from loading into their DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) as many unique plugins as they’d like. This build greatly raises that per-process FLS slot allocation ceiling, allowing loading potentially thousands of unique plugins. Beyond musicians, this change will positively impact any application that dynamically loads hundreds or thousands of unique DLLs that have statically-linked Visual C++ runtimes, or otherwise allocates FLS slots.

Reset this PC UI Improvements: We added new UI for Reset this PC as part of Settings > Update & Security > Recovery. The new UI provides a more consistent experience across devices with different configurations and requires fewer clicks to complete.

Windows Subsystem for Linux Command Line Tool Improvements:

Consolidated command line options – The wsl command line tool now includes options to manage your WSL distros that are included in the wslconfig command line tool. We intend to only update the wsl tool with the latest management options moving forward.

Import a distro for easy sideloading including to non-system drives – Use the “–import” option to imports a tar file as a new distribution. You can specify the distribution registry to the location of your choice including non-system drives.

Export your WSL distribution for simpler environment management – Use the “—export” option to export a distribution to a tar file. Your distro will export to your default downloads location.

Fast Ring Insiders can update their PC now to install this build. To check out other General changes, improvements, and fixes, click here.